"He's My Girl" by David Hallyday

1987 / #79

Rate Your Music score: 2.17 out of 5!

Some of our local radio stations in Cincinnati made weird choices as to what songs to play, but this was one rare occasion when they actually admitted it.

This high-energy rocker was the title track from the movie He's My Girl. Evidently, the film was about a musician who wins a trip to Los Angeles, but he must take a woman with him, so his male friend poses as a woman.

And Q-102 played the living shit out of the song.

This may seem strange in and of itself, because Q-102 had such a small playlist, and the record only peaked at #79 on the Hot 100, the most authoritative chart in the beeswax. But the station promoted the movie along with the song. The problem with that is that the film was not a great critical or commercial success, so the Q-102 peeps felt somewhat embarrassed that they had hyped it so much.

A few months later, some of the station's DJ's admitted on the air that they botched this one. They said the movie folks gave the station a bunch of He's My Girl swag and encouraged them to play the record. It was payola. After that humiliation, the station's on-air crew ridiculed the film and the song every chance they got.

That wasn't the last act of payola in the American radio industry. In the ensuing years, stations in other cities were caught accepting payoffs to play certain records. The word drugola was popularized, as some programmers were accepting drugs as a payoff. Hypocritically, some of the performers of these records liked to brag about being "drug-free."

It was probably impossible to have a big hit on the American pop chart in the 1980s without some support from corrupt promoters. Read the book Hit Men: Power Brokers And Fast Money Inside The Music Business by Fredric Dannen.

I put "He's My Girl" in a category of minor hits from around that time that were played on Q-102 like there was no tomorrow. This category also includes lost hits like "Never Thought" by Dan Hill and "Wild Horses" by Gino Vannelli. Lots of low-charting records were megahits at lots of top 40 stations, but Dan, Gino, and David were a weird combination, and now we know "He's My Girl" was selected because of payola.